Stubai: Arrival: Saturday 30th August

After completing the packing list I went to bed late on Friday night, in preparation for the morrow. The details (probably only readable by me) are in the Red Moleskine diary.

For a flight at 14:45 from Gatwick I needed to get up at 6:30 in order to avoid hassle and rush; but since this gave me coffee-drinking unpressured time at the airport and on the trains, this was fine. Somewhat unfortunately the flight was delayed (luggage, and then take-off slot loss) by about 1:30, and I missed a bus at Innsbruck station by less than a minute (there's another lesson to learn there, which is that the Airport bus and the Neustift bus actually cross somewhere around about the Arch. So its not necessary to get the Airport bus all the way to the Bahnhof, you can get off ~5 mins earlier; had I done that, I'd have caught the earlier bus), which meant that by the time (17:25) I got to Neder the Elferlifte had shut (17:00) so I couldn't execute Plan A, which had been to get the lift up (its the one the parapentists use, you see them in a cloud in fine weather; I've not taken it before) and then stroll down to the Karalm. I briefly considered Plan B: a taxi, but then chided myself for a wimp, shouldered my sac, and strode manfully up into the hills in a very gentle drizzle.

As you can see, I went at a fair pace; back in the Tour de Mont Blanc days we considered ~1000 m elevation gain or loss to be about a days work. I was looking around, but not nearly as much as the end of last year when we descended the lovely Pinnistal in glorious sunshine. The pic (from not-very-high on the Habicht) shows the valley, the roadhead, and the path zig-zagging up. Much of the path you see is newly-resurfaced in near-white gravel which was terribly helpful as the sun set and darkness came on and I got the head torch out.

Just before the hut there was some confusion in darkness and cloud as I missed a zig and wondered where the path markers had gone. But I was in time for Apfelstrudel.